Aftermath
by AsianScaper
Summary: Set after "Resolutions" on a planet, beside a beach. J/C talk matters through. Please R&R. Thanks.


**Title:** _Aftermath_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** Star Trek: Voyager and its characters belong to Paramount. Fortunately, the story belongs to me.   
**Rating:** G   
**Category:** General/Romance   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: Send your comments or constructive criticism to asianscaper@edsamail.com.ph   
**Summary:** After the episode 'Resolutions', what happened then? J/C talk matters through in a VERY obscure way (you know how it is...) *happy sigh* Finally got to watch the episode! Please read and review! =) Thanks!   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Archiving:** Anywhere, just tell me where it's at please.   
**Dedication:** To all the J/C shippers. For Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, and the rest of the wonderful cast who made this show possible. Thank you. (Oh, and to Red Team, by the way, who won the Intrams opening! GO RED!)   
**Author's Note:** I FINALLY got to watch Resolutions after how many weeks of waiting!!! Just some drabble from a shipper like me. There's nothing really conclusive about this piece, so draw your own conclusions. =) 

__________________ 

The braying tides, liquids of a more salty nature, careened off matter much older than the beings themselves. Oft did they touch the neoteric flesh of beginnings more intelligent, and in effect, more destructive than they were. There was hate, lost among the playground of their eyes. 

"It reminds me of a place…" the woman whispered quietly. 

"I know what you mean," uttered his gently tilting voice. 

Her laughter filtered the air of its chill. "You should. We were there for quite some time." 

She stared at him complacently, watching those brows frown at the promiscuous ebbs of the ocean, looking for a mirror that provided less pathways than what he beheld. Strength craned its head to put its fingers upon his shoulders and his body relaxed as it climbed upon the tangles of his back. Her gaze had that steady effect on him, like herbs brushing the dead man's lips, only to coax those frigid eyes into burning heat. 

He was first to speak, after that brief study of dependence. "Funny, how things get so complicated." 

"Funny?" She grunted. "Tragic is more like it." 

"Yes. Tragic." There was that smile, the fragrant grin of a summer moon, where even blossoms seemed to crumble against its heat. The heat, which made roses movable to winds. Winds that opened the casket of their fragrance, winds that fumbled about the casings of their untouchable designs as it once more fed the grains of the earth as products of mild destruction. 

"Against eternity, do you think we'd be able to change all that?" she asked him, waiting for an answer from a throat that bent to the kings of grief and listened to the boisterous howls of joy. 

"We _have_ eternity." His hand seemed to move, as if the ocean had begun its enduring ballad of love found, and love lost. He did not touch her, though, and the smile that was born into his handsome face, was reflected on hers, like the mirror she sought. 

"Ah, well, if you're egotistical enough to think that somebody like the Q would indulge you in eternity…well, well." She mocked him with a raised brow that spoke volumes of her respect. "You're far gone, old man." 

"I think I'd rather be far gone, than far removed from…" He cleared his throat. "From the ship." 

Her gaze denied the altercation of truths in his statement, as did his. He did not meet her eyes, did not wish to, for he knew that if he did, complexity would reconstruct itself into something simpler and she would struggle with the sudden rupture in her calm bowl of independence. 

"From the ship?" she repeated silently, knowing that the question would provide roads to every known miracle sought by the human heart. The way it was uttered, however, provided little in the way of response and the elixir to eternity vanished as Q always did with his flash of incandescent light. 

"Shall we return, Captain?" 

"No. We'll stay for that sunset. It does remind me of a place." 

Her ability to support his pain almost tempted his ambulant soul to touch her shoulder but he shied away at the moment the sun began to nibble upon the peaks of ever-changing waves. 

"The sand's getting into my boots," he teased. 

"Comfort obscures beauty, Commander, so why don't you just lounge and enjoy the view." 

"Very well, Captain." 

The sun did not entice him with the pillars of the light it sculpted into the air. The vista of beauty without comfort presented itself in the flames of threaded auburn, in skin so white that even elephant tusks did not bow to ivory. 

His tongue was poised to tell her of his view, but he refrained, as he often did, so that light would not conceal light as the sun did to its heralds of stars. He watched her in the same way she watched the sun falter and lean by the violet shadow of the clouds. That regal body of bolted gold did everything to touch her cheeks with warmth from milleniums of fiery squalls upon its surface. Those screaming rays did not shift to battlements of the sun's architect but turned to hushed voices of peace as they reached the dignified set of her cheeks. 

And his eyes were watching a sunset quite unlike the one unfolding before him without the benefit of heaven's beauty. Yet to him, it was so much more. 

The sand shifted beneath him as the flickering daystar groped for the last crest upon the sea and shined through, its attempts futile. Disappearing from the plains of the horizon, light threaded about the clouds in orange hues and fled into colors of Pluto's harvest. 

"Beautiful." He did not know if he uttered those words, but he knew that they were of her, and of her vision. 

She was silent, taking in the last brilliance of antiquity and savoring the icy stabs of wind. She wrapped her arms around herself, closing her eyes and smelling the saltiness of the sea and the great romance of dying light. Perfumes of nature's making made those thin lips bend by the song of hope in death, hope in the sun's quiet rebirth for the next morn. 

Those moments between the world of darkness and of light burned into their eyes as the zephyr conveyed the underlying process to nature's bondage with death and life. The smoke from nature's factories hid by dusk's cloak and offered what stars there were to blow tiny lights upon the stage of Helios' chariot. 

The cold bit with fanged teeth. 

"Comfort obscures beauty," she whispered. 

"Perhaps, Captain. It's easier to believe otherwise." The man's hand moved to his chest where an object of man's intellect rested and yielded to his machinations. "Chakotay to Voyager. Two to beam up." 

_"Aye, aye Commander."_

Standing slightly behind her as she stepped forward in greeting of this new night, he indulged in a smile that meant anything and everything. A smile that curved to angles of defeat and submission. A smile…a smile, which carried with it the burden of suffering and revealed beauty in all its splendor as it accepted relief's opposite. 

Regretfully, she would never see, as they shimmered from existence, and denied this world their eyes. 

___________ 

_I could but weep for every sigh unuttered here   
From sanguine lips; unshed, these words regret the loss,   
The plight of tongues to restless silence friends adhere,   
'Ere pith of one endures the torture of a cross. _

Oh, speak! Thou villain of soundless wit; shout, reveal!   
Ardor that haunts thy tongue, thy tempest tame!   
Rob the light from thine eyes, before thine idol kneel,   
Contours of unsung love, an encompassing flame. 

-An Excert from "The Folly in Silence, The Blessing in Disguise" 

  
______________ 

**-The End-**


End file.
